What's the Point of Life? Happiness? Success? Or Something Else Entirely?

And can sobriety help us get there?

Photo by Graham Holtshausen on Unsplash

I just finished rereading The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It was one of my favorite books in middle school, but it had been over two decades since I last read it. I went into the reread with somewhat low expectations. After all, how well could a book that I loved in middle school hold up after so many years? But, I was surprised and happy to discover the book was just as great as I remembered it being.

In case anyone hasn’t heard of it, the Hitchhiker’s Guide is a sci-fi comedy. It parodies a wide variety of science fiction, including, most directly, Asimov’s famous Foundation series.

[Spoilers ahead!]

One of the book’s main plot points centers around a computer designed to discover the answer to “life, the universe, and everything.” After seven and a half million years of working on the problem, the computer comes up with a simple, elegant, and completely nonsensical answer: 42.